Nov 6, 2007

Terrorists in the Bay Area?

I don't know for certain, but if there are, you can be sure those anti-terrorism experts are on top of it.

How, you ask?

By analyzing falafel sales in the Bay Area.

No, seriously. Because EVERYBODY KNOWS that if you eat falafel, you must be a terrorist.

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.